Radiohead

OK Computer (1997)

Jonny Greenwood's arrangements — orchestral strings, ondes Martenot, and studio manipulation deployed as readily as guitar — transformed Thom Yorke's anxieties about technological dystopia into one of the most sonically overwhelming albums in mainstream rock's history. 'Paranoid Android' alone justifies the album's canonical status: a six-minute suite moving through three distinct movements without ever feeling assembled rather than composed. The record reset the parameters of what a mainstream guitar album could aspire to.

Sleeve notes

OK Computer · 1997

Radiohead's career can be divided into the years before OK Computer (1997) and the years after, but that division is misleading. Pablo Honey and The Bends were the records of a band finding out what they were by elimination — finding that grunge would not do, that Britpop would not do, that the guitar band was a container that kept spilling. OK Computer's arrival was the moment the container broke: songs that addressed late-capitalist anxiety and alienation without the vocabulary of protest music, production that made guitar rock sound like it had no precedent.

Kid A (2000) is the riskiest record in mainstream rock: Thom Yorke had apparently decided that guitar music was finished and that electronic music was the future, and the record — all digital textures, Ondes Martenot, distorted voices — announced that decision without apology. The subsequent catalog has maintained the ambition without replicating the shock. Their influence on any band that operates in the space between art-rock ambition and pop accessibility is total.